


And Also With You

by PanBoleyn



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Star Wars Fusion, Gen, Implied Marqueliot, Order 66, Reunions, Star Wars Legends Fusion, in which Pan throws in all the references, the rest of the garbage coven is mentioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-06
Updated: 2019-09-06
Packaged: 2020-10-11 03:27:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20539364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PanBoleyn/pseuds/PanBoleyn
Summary: After surviving Order 66, there's only one place Quentin can think to go.For the Magicians AU Week Day 6 - Fantasy/Sci-Fi





	And Also With You

**Author's Note:**

> As ever, all the love to my RAO friends. <3

It’s a mistake. Quentin knows it’s a mistake. He won’t want to see him. He doesn’t want him. 

But Quentin hasn’t got anywhere else to go. He doesn’t know anything about his family except that he was born on Melida-Daan, and he couldn’t put strangers at risk because they share blood with him anyway. The Order is gone, and he didn’t belong there anyway. 

That’s the reason why the clones didn’t kill him. They were ordered to kill Jedi. Their troopers had just seen Master Fogg tell Quentin that he was no longer a Padawan, that he had defied orders too many times. All he’d wanted to do was the right thing, but his Master’s blade had sliced away his Padawan’s braid and that - 

Well, that had been that, hadn’t it?

They’d still hurt him, of course. But they’d beaten him instead of killing him, a warning, Clip told him. “Don’t try and be a hero, kid. You’re not a Jedi anymore, so just keep your head down.”

Quentin had done that. The problem was, he’d never been more than middling at Jedi healing trances, and he didn’t know if it would be safe to go to a medical center. He had some Republic credits on him - _ “Q, you should always have money on you, I know we’re gonna be Jedi but even Jedi get stranded” _ \- and that was enough to get passage to Nar Shaddaa, but… 

“I do not think you are well, my friend,” says the navigator. Quentin likes him - his name is Talon Karrde, he’s clever and sharp, but maybe a little too sharp. Quentin isn’t stupid, he knows damn well that he bought passage on a smuggler’s ship, but he also doesn’t really care. Anyway, it’s not his fault Captain Hoffner was susceptible to a Mind Trick, is it? 

“You’re probably right,” Quentin agrees, and he can feel the infection spreading in his body so he knows Karrde is right, actually. Maybe it won’t matter that they won’t want to see him, because he won’t live long enough to confirm that. “Good luck with your maiden voyage, by the way.” Karrde had told him this would be his last job as a navigator - he was being promoted to captain of his own freighter after this trip. 

He probably looks drunk, as he makes his way down the streets. Nar Shaddaa is like a shadier Coruscant, the entire moon a city. He has the address he found, but he doesn’t need it. Not here. Not in the same place as Eliot for the first time since the night before Eliot turned thirteen. 

They never talked about the bond that was there, when they were paired in training exercises, when they were just - spending time together. How their thoughts and emotions flowed so easily together, how no one could best them in anything when they were paired together. It’s been there all this time in the back of Quentin’s mind, like a wound that never quite heals, and now… 

He wonders if Eliot feels it too. It’s like a thread telling Quentin’s increasingly hazy mind where to go. And he makes it, using Force healing tricks to push down the growing fever long enough that he doesn’t fall over his own feet. He makes it all the way to the door, manages to ring for entry. 

And then the grey spires of Nar Shaddaa and the greenish sky above them are spinning in his eyes, his knees finally giving way. He expects to hit the permacrete, thinks he might hit his head hard enough to be done. Thinks that might be a relief - and he’s not supposed to think that, Master Fogg always lectures him that such despair is unbecoming of a Jedi - and then… 

There are arms around him, and a pair of familiar gold-hazel eyes are the last thing he sees before it all goes black. 

  
  


<><><>

  
  


_ So here’s the thing. Padawans who aren’t chosen by their thirteenth birthday are sent off to various service positions. Like the Agri-Corps.  _

_ Eliot was old, for a new child at the Temple. Old enough to very dimly remember that he lived on a farm once before on Pakrik Minor, and that his parents frightened him. Old enough to be very, very certain that he does not want to go to the Agri-Corps. And he won’t be chosen. He knows he won’t. He’s too angry, and too passionate, under his careless exterior. He’s not sure why he’s angry, but he thinks it might be at the Order itself.  _

_ At how everything is pushed down, stifled. “There is no emotion, there is peace.” Eliot can play along with that, but his best friend can’t. And Quentin is - he’s not the strongest in the Force, Eliot is stronger than he is, so are Julia and Alice, so are several others in their age range. But he’s the  _ ** _brightest light_ ** _ in the Force that Eliot has ever felt, can ever imagine.  _

_ But all the teachers keep talking about how he feels too much, and needs to find his peace.  _

_ They tell Eliot the same, because at the core of him is a storm. He doesn’t know why, it’s always been that way. It’s fear, mostly, fear of losing the few things and people that matter to him. Fear of hurting them. Because he knows he could, he dreams of it. Force dreams that he knows are warnings.  _

_ And so, when he runs, he runs alone, even if part of him whispers that he should take Quentin with him. He won’t be chosen but he believes Quentin will be, and his Q wants to be a Jedi more than anything. Eliot won’t take that away from him. _

  
  


<><><>

  
  


Eliot feels it, the moment the ship lands. Like a light turning on in the back of his mind, bright but flickering alarmingly at the same time. Quentin. 

It’s the first day he’s been sober since word of Order 66 reached Nar Shaddaa. Eliot doesn’t care that Chancellor Palpatine is now Emperor Palpatine, doesn’t even care about this new shadowy figure Darth Vader, who rumor already says is a hardened Jedi hunter. He’s a smuggler; he doesn’t think who runs the government is going to matter much in the long run. They’ll need new fake identification, probably need to learn some new loopholes in changed laws, whatever. 

As for the Jedi hunter thing, sure, Eliot uses the Force to be good at his job. And he did take his training saber with him when he ran, because at the time it was the only weapon he knew how to use and he was smart enough to know that going unarmed was suicidal. But Margo dumped that for him when they got word of what had happened. 

Eliot himself had been getting blind drunk, in hopes of chasing the images from his mind, but - but it hadn’t worked. He’d thought briefly of Julia and Alice, he’d always liked them, he didn’t like the idea of them gunned down by clone troopers and some of the horror had been for them but… 

It had been the image of Quentin, shot dead on the ground somewhere, that he couldn’t chase away no matter how much he drank.

But Margo, finally impatient, had gotten rid of all their alcohol, and so Eliot is sober when he feels that click into place that is Quentin in the back of his mind, an ache so constant and familiar he’d forgotten it was there suddenly vanishing. He drops his glass of water, sitting bolt upright. 

“El, what the fuck?” Margo asks, looking up from her datapad. 

“I - Q. Quentin. He’s not dead, he’s here, I don’t know how or why but he’s… here.” 

Margo knows all about the other person in Eliot’s life. He’d told her everything, because she is - she is the other half of him in ways he hadn’t known he was looking for. Margo is herself Force sensitive but almost entirely untrained. She prefers it that way, and Eliot had offered. 

“My parents told the Jedi to go fuck themselves and got away with it ‘cause they had the money, they’re assholes but I figure they were onto something,” she always says. They’re attuned to each other, he and Margo, and the fire of her is the other place in the back of his mind so constant he can forget it’s there, but other than that he’s the Force-user of this relationship. 

But he’d told Margo about Quentin, everything about him. She’d offered to go kidnap him once or twice, because Eliot would usually get sad when he talked about him. But now…

“A fucking Jedi, coming here? Eliot…” 

“He’s not an idiot, Margo, if he’s coming here it’s because he knows he has to disappear and -” Eliot blinks. “Wait. He is actually coming here, as in, he’s on his way to our apartment. He, he must have sensed…” 

Eliot doesn’t know if he would have had the faith to come to Quentin, if their roles were reversed. And the way Quentin’s sense flickers like a dying light fixture has him nervous so that he all but runs to the door when it chimes. 

He’s just in time to catch Quentin as he crumples, unconscious and flushed with fever. 

  
  


<><><>

  
  


_ From his earliest memories in the creche, Quentin has three friends. Alice, Julia, and Eliot. Alice and Julia are always the top students in all their lessons, Quentin doing pretty well himself and Eliot either brilliant or barely scraping by depending on what it is and how interesting he finds it.  _

_ But in paired exercises, with Force lessons or lightsaber training? Eliot and Quentin are unstoppable together. Instructor Bant even says that it’s unfortunate that no Master or Knight can have two Padawans, because “really, I can’t imagine how we might separate you two!”  _

_ Julia is chosen before she’s even eleven by Master Kore, and they almost never see her after that. Alice is chosen just after she turns eleven by Master Adi Gallia, who no one thought would ever take a Padawan again until it turned out that Siri Tachi had not left the Order after all but had been undercover. Alice is still at the Temple often, so they can see her, but she’s usually too busy to talk for more than a few minutes. _

_ Of course Alice’s Master is a member of the Council, and of course Julia’s is so powerful that on one world, she inadvertently made the natives think she’s a goddess, or so Eliot says. He’s a little bitter that no one has picked him yet, Quentin knows - Eliot is the oldest of them, closest to the cutoff of thirteen, so it’s understandable. But he’s kind of glad of it, because once they’re both chosen, they won’t see each other so much anymore.  _

_ But then it’s only a month till Eliot’s birthday, only a couple weeks, only days… and Eliot is like a wind in Quentin’s head, sometimes a breeze and sometimes a gale, only right now he feels like a tornado.  _

_ He wakes up the morning of Eliot’s thirteenth birthday to a note shoved under his door.  _

** _Q,_ **

** _I’m not going to be picked. You know it, I know it. But you will. You’re going to be an amazing Jedi, I don’t care what the instructors say about you getting too attached. They don’t know you like I do. I’d take you with me, but it wouldn’t be fair to you. I wish I could, though. I’ll miss you. _ **

** _\- El_ **

_ Two months later, Master Fogg makes Quentin his Padawan, because as far as all the instructors can see, Quentin’s bad habit of attachments is gone. It’s not, but when the only people he’d ever been attached to are gone or might as well be… well, it comes to the same thing, doesn’t it? _

  
  


<><><>

  
  


Quentin wakes up slowly, in an unfamiliar room. But he doesn’t panic. He’s too tired, for one thing, and for another thing, there’s a warmth at the back of his mind that has always meant he’s safe, because it means Eliot. 

It still means that, even after fifteen years. 

“You scared me there,” Eliot says quietly, and Quentin finds him sitting beside the bed, looking exhausted. “It’s a damn good thing I’ve got a knack for healing trances on other people, or you - what happened to you?” 

And so Quentin tells him about Fogg expelling him, the clones turning on them only minutes later - but not killing Quentin because he’d just been kicked out. “Maybe you should have taken me with you after all,” he tries to joke when he’s done. It falls flat, and not just because he’s too tired for the humor to really show. 

Eliot grabs his wrist, his grip just shy of too tight. “Don’t you think I’ve been telling myself that since we heard, Q?” 

“El, I didn’t mean -” And it aches how easily they fall back into old nicknames, Quentin has missed him _so much_ and now… 

“I should have taken you with me,” Eliot says quietly. “But you found me anyway. Q, how…” 

“I did a search,” Quentin says, almost sheepish. “I’m a pretty good slicer, these days - I met this pair on the lower levels of Coruscant, Kady and Penny, and Penny’s twin brother who only gets called 23 for some reason. Anyway, they showed me some stuff, and slicing comes easy to me. Almost as easy as sabaac. I was worried about you.” 

“Stubborn idiot. You should hate me - and don’t start in on how a Jedi doesn’t feel hate. A Jedi wouldn’t care enough about a washout runaway to go hunting him down either,” Eliot says, a strange look in his eyes. 

“Well, no,” Quentin says softly. “But I’m apparently not a very good Jedi, am I?” 

“And thank fuck for that,” Eliot mutters, leaning over and pulling Quentin into a hug. “All I’ve thought about since I heard is - is that I basically killed you, leaving you there. And then you show up and fall over half dead in my arms, that’s not  _ fair _ , Q.” 

Part of Quentin, the part that has always wanted to be angry, always convinced that Eliot must not have cared as much as he’d thought, wants to pull away. But he’s missed him, and Eliot wouldn’t hug him like this unless that stupid note had been exactly the truth, and he had thought he was doing the best thing. So he doesn’t pull away, he just hugs Eliot back just as tightly. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I might bring danger here, I didn’t think… I just… didn’t know where to go. Couldn’t risk Coruscant to go to Kady and the twins, y’know? And Alice, and Julia, they might be… they’re probably…” Alice, who had been on her first mission as a solo Knight, Julia who’d been so far in the Outer Rim with her Master it was almost the Unknown Regions.

“I don’t care,” Eliot says fiercely. “Margo’s agreed - we’re gonna have to change your name, maybe some of your look, just to be safe, but you’re staying here, Q. This is Nar Shaddaa, you say you’re a slicer? They’ll have work for you, I promise.” 

Quentin - doesn’t know what to say. He wants to say so much, and so he settles for, “Margo?” 

Eliot sits back, and the fond smile on his face is almost the one he used to turn on Quentin himself, but a little different. Meant, Quentin guesses, for the woman called Margo that he proceeds to tell Quentin all about. 

He meets Margo later that day. She’s terrifying and brilliant, and threatens to drop Quentin off the edge of Nar Shaddaa’s top level if he hurts Eliot. Quentin should probably be insulted, since the last time they saw each other, Eliot hurt him. 

But… he isn’t, really. In fact, he kind of thinks he and Margo understand each other. 

  
  


<><><>

  
  


_ The funny part, years later, is that it’s Margo’s fault that they join the Rebellion. She was born on Telos and raised on Cejansij herself, but her mother was from Alderaan. Not that she ever much liked her mother, but she’d liked Aunt Eirene and her cousins, and when Alderaan went…  _

_ She felt it, the shock wave through the Force. Her boys have tag-teamed on her over the years till she learned a few tricks, but the jolt she felt was nothing to the way Eliot clutched at his head, or how Quentin actually collapsed with the pain of it. It wasn’t until later when they found out what it was that it had been Margo who was hit hardest, thinking of her aunt and her cousins and - _

_ She hasn’t talked to her family since she ran away. None of them would have wanted to acknowledge her, after that. _

_ But she still finds herself lying in their bed, staring blankly at the ceiling even when Quentin and Eliot come in and lie down on either side of her, their hands in hers. She stares and stares until the numb, shocked grief gives way to something else.  _

_ Fury.  _

_ They leave Nar Shaddaa on their ship the  _ ** _Cliffside Crown_ ** _ two weeks after Alderaan died, Eliot and Margo in the pilots’ chairs and Quentin at navigation, like always. Even on the Smugglers’ Moon, things have been subdued since word reached them of just what had happened.  _

_ They find a Rebel cell on Kerilt, which is how they join up. “You don’t have to,” Margo says before they officially sign on, but all that gets her is two very unimpressed looks.  _

_ “Like you could get rid of us now,” Eliot says.  _

_ “I’ve been saying we should do this for years,” Quentin points out.  _

_ Kerilt isn’t terrible. The near-miss in the Poln system is what gets the three of them on the map though - when General Cracken has to get the duped Rebels, including Princess Leia Organa, out in a hurry, the  _ ** _Crown _ ** _ comes in handy for a speedy escape.  _

_ Which is when they first hear the name Skywalker, and when they find out about Princess Leia’s friend who carries a lightsaber.  _

_ “Damn, we’re gonna have to sit down with the kid, help him get the hang of things, aren’t we?” Margo sighs once the three of them have retreated to their shared quarters - it gets them a few looks, that they always stay as three, but none of them care at this point. Some cultures have clusters of partners bigger than three, it’s just humans that get fussy when it’s not common in their particular one. _

_ Quentin, whose lightsaber is hidden in a secret compartment of their ship, tries for an innocent look and fails when Margo asks. Of course - even after everything, he still misses it, or at least parts of it. _

_ Eliot sighs. “Probably, dear, but for now, Hoth is cold, and I can think of much better things to do than sit around our quarters, can’t you?” _

_ Well, it’s going to be one hell of a ride, anyway. _

**Author's Note:**

> So, in my headcanon for this verse, Julia and Alice survived too, Quentin and Eliot just can't know that.
> 
> Also, Kore is another mythological name for Persephone.
> 
> Come chat with me on tumblr at eidetictelekinetic.tumblr.com or on Twitter at Fae_Boleyn. :)


End file.
